Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

From the Man Booker-nominated author of The Water Cure comes an elegant and hypnotic new novel of obsession that centers on the real unsolved mystery of the 1951 mass poisoning of a French village.

Still reeling in the aftermath of the deadliest war the world had ever seen, the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. Some historians believe the mysterious illness and violent hallucinations were caused by spoiled bread; others claim it was the result of covert government testing on the local population.
In that town lived a woman named Elodie. She was the baker’s wife: a plain, unremarkable person who yearned to transcend her dull existence. So when a charismatic new couple arrived in town, the forceful ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet, Elodie was quickly drawn into their orbit. Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse – but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?
Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory’s hall of mirrors, and an erotic fable of transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Historical, Mystery, Audiobook

184 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 2, 2023

About the author

Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988, and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, The New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story ‘Grace’ was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story ‘The Running Ones’ won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016.

Sophie’s debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in early 2019 to critical acclaim, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Her second novel Blue Ticket will be published in Spring 2020.

Reviews

[Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

i respect how horny this was

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎]

The words in this novel felt non-essential to me until I got to page 171 and I came upon this sentence:

Three houses away the mayor was being eaten by snakes.

That is one fine sentence.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Well this was incredibly frustrating, I was really looking forward to it but other than about ten pages at the end of the book (if the whole story had been like this I would have loved it) I really didn’t care about the protagonist, or her interactions with the Ambassador and Violet that went on and on. I needed a lot more about the cursed bread! It felt like near the end she thought ‘oh bugger yes, i’m meant to write about that aren’t I?!’

[Sujoya - theoverbookedbibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Happy Publication Day(U.S.)!
April 4, 2023


“Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.”

A fictional take on the 1951 mass poisoning of the small French village of Pont Saint Esprit, Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh is an atmospheric, complex and hypotonic novel that reeled me in and kept me hooked till the very last page. The end will leave you a tad unsettled, but I guess that is the author’s intention. Stunning prose, flawed characters, and uneven structure create a claustrophobic yet gripping reading experience.

The story revolves around Elodie, presently widowed wife of a village baker who recounts the events leading up to a mass tragedy that occurred in her village. Elodie, the baker’s wife leads a monotonous life, selling bread, gossiping with the other village women while washing clothes and being ignored by her husband whose passion for baking was markedly more pronounced than his romantic interest in his wife. The arrival of a new couple, the affluent Ambassador and his wife Violet, create ripples in the village. Elodie is taken with Violet, and though initially, Violet ignores Elodie’s attempts at engaging her in conversation, Violet and the Ambassador befriend Elodie and her husband. The story is presented to us in flashbacks from the perspective of Elodie with an epistolary element in the form of letters she addresses to Violet interspersed throughout the narrative. The novel primarily revolves around the complicated dynamic between Elodie and Violet, or more precisely Elodie’s obsession with Violet – she oscillates between awe and envy and as the narrative progresses her sense of reality blurs. Much of this stems from her monotonous life and lack of physical intimacy with her husband. Violet’s motivations are initially unclear - she claims to be lonely, and shares intimate details of her relationship with the Ambassador alternating between treating Elodie like a confidante and at times being deliberately elusive creating an aura of mystery that confuses Elodie and further fuels her obsession, leaving her susceptible to both Violet’s and the Ambassador’s manipulations.

“I picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness. You made yourself a character in your own story, at least as much as I made you a character in mine. Now it’s impossible to know what I was told and what I created.”

This is my first Sophie Mackintosh novel and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future. Many thanks to author Sophie Mackintosh, Doubleday Books and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel.

“I think about how desire grows in the spaces around the known, where things are at their most and least real, where the terror of all the possibilities fracturing out through our lives is suspended, momentarily, so we can look them in the eye for once, and isn’t that what we are searching for when we debase ourselves for love, one moment of certainty in this strange and beautiful world.”

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I think there's another animal growing underneath my skin, she said then. Do you know what I mean?

A second read for me and this time we clicked wonderfully, possibly because I read the book in two sittings and allowed myself to be steeped in the strong brew of words and images without worrying too much about where it was all going.

This seems distinctly Freudian with the play of sex and death, of madness and trauma, where the usage of symbols operate as a form of dream-work and can't necessarily be de-coded in any rational one-for-one way.

This time, too, I noticed the intimations of war in the past (the real incident of Le Pain Maudit on which this is loosely based took place in France in 1951) and the requisite hidden pasts, secrets and things unspoken.

Gorgeously mysterious and haunting, I remain impressed with Mackintosh's writing which has a lushness without spilling over into nonsense - and which resists straightforward interpretation without becoming meaningless. I could imagine reading this again.

--------------------------------

I am the one left alive. I am the archivist, the keeper of their secrets. They gather around me with wet cloth in their hands, drowned cloth, marked with blood that won't wash out.

I loved the erotic atmosphere of this but really wish I'd had more of an interpretational steer as to what was actually going on. There's little narrative thread to hold onto, and I frequently felt lost in a fog of words.

There are places where this reminded me of Joyce Carol Oates' 'gothic' novels where the uncanny erupts into a realist setting; at others this felt more hallucinogenic and dreamlike where 'reality' is unstable and mysterious, and what we read cannot be counted on with any security.

In the end, it was Mackintosh's writing which just about carried me through.

Gorgeous cover though!

Thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew mass poisoning could be so sexy

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

This didn’t work for me at all. I was misled by the blurb, which made me think it would actually have something to do with this interesting historical event in France. However, that only provides a very lightly sketched framework for a rather heavy handed and languid exploration of an erotic triangle or quadrangle, in a vein of lush sadism/masochism. While the writing is rich and an intensely voluptuous (if troubling) atmosphere is evoked, there isn’t really a plot and none of the unreliable characters really engaged me.

I think those who like the erotic Gothic might like this. If like me, you’re a fan of historical fiction, don’t be misled by the blurb.

[Kelly Ward · Rating 1 out of 5]

This actually made me unfollow the booktok account that recommended it to me.

[Ari Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, rounded down. Mackintosh is taking tremendous risks with this, and fully commits to describing the extremes of human desire, obsession, madness, and cruelty, creating a suffocatingly claustrophobic atmosphere. But the payoff here is underwhelming, and the ellipticalness and archness of the narrative, the non-linear time structure, and the ornate lushness of the prose, all combined to turn this into an exercise in style for its own sake. This was enjoyable on a page-to-page level, but oddly unsatisfying as a full-course meal.

While her first two novels (The Water Cure and Blue Ticket) were near-future dystopias, this one is historical in setting, but it's far artier and more experimental than standard historical fiction. Elodie, our unreliable narrator, is the baker's wife in a small French town in the early 1950s, stuck in a sexless marriage. Beset with ennui, she becomes erotically obsessed with two newcomers: the haughty ambassador and his glamorous wife Violet (their respectablehaut-bourgeois marriage is not what it seems).

All of them are obsessed with food, either with prosaic baguettes or imported luxuries, and the rich couple separately delight in inflicting psychosexual violence upon Elodie, who submits to (and perversely delights in) these escalating humiliations.

In the discordant final section, these isolated incidents of transgression snowball into the entire town going collectively insane, based on a real historical incident of mass poisoning, but this felt airlifted in from a different novel entirely.

[verynicebook · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5! Cursed Bread is my first Sophie Mackintosh novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a little slow to start, and it took me a while to figure out what was going on, but once it got going, I was completely immersed in the strange dynamics and bizarre daily life that was developing. It was an odd, mysterious, fever-dream-like story. It felt like Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Witch) meets David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Lost Highway). It was not exactly what I expected, but it was a lot more fun and weird despite being very dark and disturbing.

I was left with a few unanswered questions at the end, which I assume was the author's intention. I believe it was intended to feel more like a strange dream in which you can't always place what happened when you wake up, leaving you with these fragmented and sometimes unsettling memories to piece together. Cursed Bread will be released on April 4th. Thank you to Doubleday and Netgalley for the review copy!

[Joana da Silva · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the beginning I understood nothing, and at the end I felt like I was back at the beginning.

[Olivia (Stories For Coffee) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Do you lay bread on your tongue and think of me, Violet, do you swallow it like a sacrament, do you still get down on your knees? Is there someone on their knees before you, clutching at your ankles, murmuring words for whatever ghost is watching at the door to overhead and remember?”

Erotic, captivating, and so utterly twisted, Cursed Bread is an absolute delight of a novel inspired by an event that took place in a small town in France in the 1950’s that is perfect for fans of corrupted romantic dynamics reminiscent of Phantom Thread (2017)

Even though it is a quick less-than-200-page read, I took my time with this quiet novel, savoring every word until my book was stained with endless highlights as Mackintosh effortlessly explored infatuation, envy, marriage, hysteria and an obsession between two women that sours into a poison flowing beneath the surface of a tiny village.

With so little room to pack a punch, Cursed Bread so easily demanded my attention and drew me deeper into a world of corruption and desire that consumes one whole. It is a story that will be thinking about for years to come.

[Tara Hopper · Rating 1 out of 5]

finally I am free from the shackles of this book

[casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

veryyy up my alley tone/atmosphere wise and i loved the writing like i devoured this in a day 😭. it’s dreamy & melancholic (in a slow moving way for sure like this is very abstract plot mainly vibes, as a heads up) + has an air to it that almost feels like you’re wading through a ghost story?? yet this still has a ton of tension and with everyone in this being so shifty it leaves a really cool air of ambiguity on the whole story, rlly enjoyed :)

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

— 3.5 stars rounded down

This book is dangerous because it will make you the bad kind of horny, like the “should I text my ex-situationship” kind of horny. Good but also bad, yk? 🥴 I suggest you either buy it for yourself and enjoy it with a fat glass of wine and a loaf of freshly baked bread, or you buy it as a gift to give to your sexually repressed neighbour. Just slip it under their door, don’t even include a note. 🙂‍↔️

Cursed Bread centres on the unsolved mystery of a post-World War II town in rural France that saw its inhabitants mass poisoned in 1951. Sophie Mackintosh comes along and weaves into this curious affair a tale dominated by obsession and lust, sticky with desire and smelling like a boulangerie at 8am on a crisp winter morning. On the page, it’s about Elodie, a baker’s wife, who gets up every morning to sell the bread her husband makes. Bread, that he would much rather sink his hands into than her. Sexually frustrated and unfulfilled, Elodie focuses all her attention on the new couple that has arrived in town. He is an ambassador from the States; his wife, Violet, is everything. Elodie cannot seem to decide whether she wants to be her or be with her, but certainly cannot stop herself from being drawn deeper and deeper into the wealthy couple’s orbit.

Told through alternating timelines, a before, during, and after Violet, and always from Elodie’s point of view, we get to share in her desires and her continuously eroticised fantasies, though, just like the townspeople, we need to constantly question whether we trust this unreliable narrator and whether everything is truly as it seems. This becomes increasingly difficult as with every chapter, Mackintosh ramps up the Freudian, the repressed finding again and again ways to make itself visible. Dreams and visions can’t necessarily be decoded, as sometimes you will read a sentence or an entire passage and not quite know what they stand for, or what they’re meant to tell us.

Once you start to question the character’s reality and approach this novel with logic and calculation, it is already over, and the book will fall apart like a flaky croissant. Instead, I think the best way to come at this is from a dreamlike state that accepts some things can’t be rationalised or explained. The story blooms in the in-between spaces of the novel, and since it falls flat on its nose with its ending, the literal in-between bits are the ones I enjoyed best. Towards the end, I wished I had had more of an idea of what was going on as I got lost in confusing, though artful, labyrinthine word structures.

Mackintosh’s writing is visceral and artful, and there’s pleasure in reading and re-reading her metaphors, combining hunger for food with a hunger for desire. Ultimately, very enjoyable on a page-to-page level, the novel’s entire narrative left something to be desired. Where this story would find an excellent second home, though, is on the big screen. I’m thinking Robert Eggers (Nosferatu, The Northman) meets Rose Glass (Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding). Let me know once they decide to turn this into a movie. I’ll be watching.

[Nancy Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The truth is that after the first thirty pages or so of reading this novel, I stopped and added to my goodreads status something to the effect that I hoped that it got better because I wasn't really enjoying it to that point. Well, never a quitter, I kept reading -- not only did it get better, but after that first stopping point I did not want to put this book down. Not at all.

full post here:
https://www.readingavidly.com/2023/04...

Cursed Bread begins with the arrival of a new couple in a small, unnamed town in postwar France. The Ambassador (no other name given) has (he says) been tasked with a "government project, a kind of survey" to "learn more about the real people of this country. To truly get to know them, the citizens who make it what is is." The women in the town are quite naturally curious about his wife Violet, but none more so than Elodie, the wife of the town baker, who narrates this story looking back on events that eventually led her to "a convalescent place by the sea" after some pretty horrific happenings in her town. At the outset she wonders about her memories, "holding them up to the light" and questioning whether "it really did happen like this." And, if it did, could she "tell it differently?" Our storyteller decides that "perhaps it's best to be honest," so we must place ourselves in her hands.

At its heart, the novel examines the power of desire, which can be both destructive and self-destructive and in this case transformative; it is dark and claustrophobic, seasoned by an ongoing sense of danger that ratchets up the tension until the end. It is only at the end of Cursed Bread in a brief "Author's Note" that we learn that

"In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning. There are many theories regarding the source of this catastrophe. None have ever been proved."

This event has been thought to have been caused by ergot poisoning -- le pain maudit (cursed bread) but who knows -- there are any number of theories that have been floated about regarding this incident. I don't necessarily think that the author is trying to simply fictionalize that traumatic event here, but setting the novel against the backdrop of the Pont-Saint-Esprit events worked for me, since the effects of the poisonous relationships in this story couldn't help but to seep through to the rest of the town. And while completely different, I couldn't help but to be reminded of Barbara Comyns' excellent Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, the blurb of which mentions a newspaper article with the headline wondering "Who will be smitten by this fatal madness next?," which, given what happens in Cursed Bread, seems more than appropriate.

Although a lot of professional critics and more than a few readers have given this novel rather tepid reviews, I loved it and definitely recommend it for those looking for something a bit different and something definitely on the darker side.

[Grapie Deltaco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unexpectedly horny and overflowing with bizarre sapphic yearning (obsession)

Despite the dread of knowing what this is all building up to nothing could’ve prepared me for the actual climax

Horrific and just so weird


CW: murder, explicit sexual content, suicide, self harm, mass poisoning (including children and animals)

[Nina · Rating 1 out of 5]

The description of this book is completely deceiving. I picked this up excited and intrigued, thinking it is about the mysterious mass poisoning of a small French town (apparently a true story) - this only comes up in the last 10 pages (and feels completely random). Instead what I got was a deranged woman's ramblings about a couple she is creepily obsessed with which were supremely hard to follow... and also very dull. Good thing this book is short!

[Gu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Schizophrenic mind of a woman eroticizing her neighbors. Bread is poisoned and everyone dies. No, thank you.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a shocker how much I loved this book, considering how much i disliked Mackintosh’s debut “The Water Cure.” I skipped over her second novel, but decided to pick up the new release because the premise sounded intriguing (especially with my knowledge of the real-life massacre it was loosely based on: Le Pain Maudit). Kinda shocked by the low Goodreads rating. This gave me old-school gothic vibes.

With this book, the atmosphere is still there (Mackintosh nails that, once again), but this story gave me more to feast on. I’m a sucker for obsession stories, but this one added something special to the mix: the restlessness of small-town life, eerie imagery, sexual dominance vs sexual repression/complacency.

In a nutshell, this book kept me in a trance. Although I was always curious about where this story was heading, and the prose was delicious as hell, I was even more enraptured with how the book made me feel: seduced.

[Zuky the BookBum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly fantastic!!!

I loved how this had spatterings of horror but was mainly a character study. It’s quite heavy being inside Elodie’s head, she’s obsessive to the nth degree with dark and disturbing thoughts as well as plenty self-hatred.

The writing is fluid, I got completely swept up in its current and was unable to stop myself from drowning in this dark and unsettling story.

Sometimes I finish a book that so perfectly fits into my ideal of dreamy, hard to grasp, unsettling literary fiction and I think “yeah people are gonna hate this”.

(Originally read & reviewed in September 2022)

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

The kind of edgy fever-dream that I love, and I loved this. It’s a particular kind of hazy read which won’t be for everyone. Although this is definitely a vibe that works for me, knowing the historical case that inspired this novel before I began reading helped me to appreciate some of the more obscure stages of the narrative. I enjoyed this reading experience slowly. Mackintosh is the kind of writer you can do that with.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I gave this book a second chance! After reading Blue Ticket and The Water Cure, I've had an itch to return to Mackintosh's most recent release. Looking at my 2023 review, I don't disagree entirely with some of the points I made, but I enjoyed Cursed Bread much more this time around.

The book remains ambiguous and fragmented, but a second read helps put everything into place. Mackintosh's prose remains some of my favourite, and this novel in particular felt reminiscent of Elsewhere and Organ Meats. Give me sapphic yearning, abstract prose, and a moody atmosphere, and I'll eat it up.

Re-reads make up a small proportion of my annual reading, but I felt this calling to me, and I'm glad I listened. I'll consider this a successful experiment in measuring how my reading tastes have changed over time.
---
(2023 review)

Ehhh. On paper this has everything I love in literature - unhinged and unreliable narrators, historical references, and slow descents into chaos. In practice, this really did not do much for me; I'd give it a 2.5 stars, but I will say the writing is genuinely beautiful in some spots. In other spots, it seems to ramble on and makes the novel feel a loooot longer than it truly is. I wouldn't even describe this as a fever dream, but rather a disjoint pair of simultaneous plots that have no real bearing on one another.

"Sometimes reality peels back like the skin of an orange."

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1951 the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southeast France suffered a large-scale poisoning (almost certainly the result of bread contaminated with a natural form of LSD) and that tragic circumstance inspired Sophie Mackintosh to write... this? Okay.

2.5 stars

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edgy, erotic, and completely unhinged. Like seriously, I feel like the author herself lost control of the narrative, but in a way that somehow made for a compelling read.

The story, such that it exists, is of a lowly baker's wife, Elodie, in a post-war French town. The baker is completely disinterested in his wife, so when two strangers, sophisticated Violet and her ambassador husband arrive on the scene, Elodie becomes obsessed with them. It's apparently based on (and by based on, I mean inspired loosely by) a real town where the residents were poisoned, and who did it and how was never solved.

That sounds straightforward enough, but the book felt to me like Fatal Attaction set down in the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes believable, sometimes not. Often inexplicable. If I was a re-reader, I would definitely read this one again though. The mysterious, taut, atmospheric writing . . .the puzzle of it all . . .the solutions just always slightly out of reach. It's crazy. Crazy good.

[Mandy Kool · Rating 1 out of 5]

How many times can a woman want her husband to touch her so she fantasizes about a woman named violet and her weird husband?

There was supposed to be bread that killed people but it felt like none of that and all of a woman’s weird fantasies. I like weird, but it also has to have a narrative more than just longing and weird conversations.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF.

I absolutely loved this from the beginning - I felt immediately as though I was transported to some little French town with some strange goings on... it brought to mind Mrs March, and Picnic at Hanging Rock, and I was so there for it. I was also totally besotted with the writing to begin with...until we got to the 'Dear Violet' chapters which I hated, found tedious to read and then got fed up at constantly being strung along in the dark as to what was really going on.

There was something here, but not enough to pull me beyond 70 pages, and my new thing this year is to ditch books I'm just not enjoying so here we are.

Also totally miffed as to why they changed the cover for publication - the yellowish one that I have on my proof is far, far better and definitely invokes the vibe of the book much better.

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to the audiobook and was mesmerized. I'd like to get my hands on a physical copy and read it again.

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was weird, grotesque, had barely any plot, and made absolutely no sense. But I loved it ok? Sue me! 5/5. The rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

[erica ࣪ ִֶָ☾. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5★
”Sometimes reality peels back like the skin of an orange, she told me, quietly. Had I misheard her? Pass me the salt, she said.”

Who would’ve guessed mass poisoning could be so horny 🤭